Cory
This chapter talked about what really matters when it comes to teaching, and then went on to talk about backward design. In general, one should teach the overarching ideas of their subject, with the smaller facts and details supporting the overarching ideas. If a teacher wants their students to learn these ideas, an effective method of planning is by fallowing the three step backward design model. The first step is figuring out the desired results. What do you want your students to be able to do/understand by the end of your unit? The second step is to determine what is acceptable evidence of this understanding. How and how often will you assess your students understanding of the material? The third and final step is to plan your actual lessons. What kind of lessons will you create to get you major ideas across?
Synthesis
Cory
For the most part, everyone talked about two thing s that connect well together: backward planning and that teachers should focus on the overarching ideas of their content. For the most part most of my classmates were saying that it is very important to point out the large ideas and what you expect of your students throughout the course. Many people really liked the backward design model because it gave you a concrete strategy to work with when it comes to making a curriculum.
Cory
This chapter started to tie together backwards design and differentiated learning. In the chapter, it explained the three steps to backward design, and then went on to explain where differentiated learning can be used at each step. But over all, this chapter focused on how teaches should focus more on the big idea when designing a unit, having the smaller details filled in along the way. I couldn’t agree more with this. I am personally someone who likes to read something and then think of it as a big picture rather than a large group of small details. It’s hard to see through the forest when you get caught up in the leaves. In this case we need to focus on the larger ideas for our students to fully understand the smaller one. I found it interesting that if we were to take 30 minutes of instructional time for all of the benchmarks stated by Robert Marzano and John Kendall, then it would take an additional nine years of schooling for a student to learn all of them. This is because some standards are way too narrow, and in my opinion, they should be broadened. Many American and Canadian textbooks also have too many standards, trying to make the most bang for their buck. But this is why teachers who try to teach to the textbook fail. I personally never liked the teachers that felt they were restricted to the textbook. In those classes, I felt that I didn’t need the teacher at all, all I needed was the textbook because it had all of the information.
Sarah
In this chapter I learned about the backward design process. It says to first consider the big picture by considering goals, examining content standards, and reviewing curriculum expectations. The next thing to do is to narrow it down by considering in advance the assessment evidence that is needed to document the targeted learning has been achieved. The final step in the process is to completely narrow down what you are doing. In the last step, as the teacher you figure out what instructional activities are the most appropriate. The big thing that this design plan provides is the structure to support flexibility in teaching and assessments while honoring the integrity of the content but also respecting the individuality of the students learning processes. This impacts me in a big way. Since I will have to write lesson plans and the plan for a unit, I have a way of doing so that will first make sure that I have reached the content standards and curriculum expectations. Using this process I can look at the big picture first and then begin breaking the unit into parts. This process will make it easier to see where I am headed before I plan a lesson or unit instead of planning a lesson and not knowing where I am going with it or if it meets the curriculum or content standards. This method of making lesson plans will majorly impact my classroom because I can teach the curriculum and satisfy the standards while satisfying each student’s individual learning process and style.
Lydia
As a teacher I have to be aware of what the requirements for the classes I teach are. I also have to determine if some of the standards that I have will not be relevant because they are too large or too small to teach in the amount of time that I will have in a certain class. I also have to determine what will be an acceptable way to test a student’s knowledge. I have learned that I can plan all of this out on something called the backward design. This will affect my classroom because it will give structure to the class while also giving students in my class the chance to explore their own learning abilities. This will affect me because it will give me a guideline to what I should be teaching as well as give me an idea of things that I should change for the next year if my plan did not work. It is also important that I determine ahead of time in what way I should gauge the knowledge that the students have learned from my lessons. In Social Studies I could either decide to give a multiple choice assessment, a written assessment, or ask the students to give a presentation. This will affect me because I must make the decision on how to correctly assess my students and make sure that they carry the knowledge with them to their years ahead of them. This will affect my students because some of them may be good at taking test while others will excel in creative assessments such as projects.
Dominick
This chapter brought forth a sad, but true reality for all teachers. There is too much material and too little time for all of it to be taught. The important for future educators to realize after reading this chapter is to get across the main points in there material. Making the student see the bigger picture is a key part to teaching your content correctly. Rushing through information in an attempt to cover all of the material in the course will cause the classroom to change from a place of tranquility for students to a nightmare. Teachers will sometimes get too caught up in trying to cover everything in the book and miss out on what they are actually supposed to be doing. The teacher’s main goal should be to present the big picture to students, so they can carry that information with them once they leave the classroom. Obviously, giving the student smaller details to work with is good in understanding the over arching theme, but it should not be a priority to hit on every single small detail. Students should not be pressured to learn a ton of material in a short amount of time, well at least in high school they should not. Teachers need to take it step by step starting with what they want to accomplish. What does the teacher want their students to take away from the course? Teachers then need to figure out they will know whether or not they have succeed. How will they know if students have gotten a grasp on the material? Test? Quizzes? Projects? Essays? Finally, they will need to figure what materials they will need available to them. What is the teacher going to need to be provided in order to meet their goals?
Cheyenne
I think backward planning is a really important tool for teachers, especially when it comes to trying to figure out the whole overarching point of a unit. Starting in the opposite direction, creating lessons first and then bringing them all together in the end, seems like it has much more potential for error. A teacher could be planning lessons, thinking that they will all work together, and then realize they are missing a key point, or don’t really mesh well together. With backwards planning, it kind of helps to eliminate the possibility that you’ll end up with a bunch of lessons that in theory go well together, but in practice are kind of a mess. I am also a fan of how the text discourages readers, and thus teachers, from solely teaching from the books. Yeah, textbooks can be a good base for Units and lessons, but I’ve often had teachers where their entire class was just us reading the book and then him repeating the same information the next day. He also expected that through all of this fact learning and memorization, we would figure out a way to think more in-depth about the contents. We never did, and because of his poor teaching style, many of us didn’t do well in the class. Sure, if you have a textbook available, it can be helpful to look at the book as a guide towards where you want your class to go, but you should move further than that when actually teaching the material.
Katelin
In the profession of teaching, we all know that there is always way too much content in a year to get through if you want your students to actually learn the material. I was amazed when it said that it was an additional nine of years of school to get through everything, which is more than half of their education experience. So basically, what every school has to decide is what is really the “big ideas” that we need to have our students learn? This is a huge topic that I will have to learn and others will also. Creating and focusing on the essential questions is a part that will tie into it also. Also, that the “what” to teaching is where this is important. Not worrying about how you’re going to adapt the concept to every student, but more of what is that concept that you want every student to learn.The design is more clear in my head on the fact that figuring out the end goal that you want students to learn is essential to teaching because if you have an idea that is “foggy” on how it will turn out, it may be a waste of time and not be executed correctly. I need to know what I want them to learn in order for them to learn it. Another important part I took away from this is that I can not vary the criteria for an assignment, or it becomes unfair and each student isn’t completing the same assignment.
Sara
In chapter three of Integrating Differentiated Instruction & Understanding by Design, we are introduced to the concept of standards. These standards are set forth by the government to ensure that students are learning the material that they need to at the correct time. They are meant to ensure a student’s education experience is at the level it needs to be while also regulating schools in the same state. While standards are meant to be a good thing there are parts of them that can be tricky for a teacher, such as the number of standards that they are required to teach in a given year. There can sometimes be too many standards that teachers are expected to teach, there is just simply not enough time in the school year for all of them. Even with the expectation that a teacher may not be able to hit all standards in a school year, there is still the daunting task of how to get through as many standards as possible while still making sure students are actually learning the material. By focusing on a big picture, and smaller essential questions teachers can more accurately help students understand the material. In a math classroom the application of this idea is very important. In any given year in a student’s math education there are going to be multiple rules and formulas that students will need to understand. To try to hit all the standards teacher can simply rush over concepts, give students a formula and tell them to memorize, test them and move on. However by doings this students will not absorb the information. It will require careful consideration and planning to ensure that students will retain pertain information, as well as the use of big ideas and essential questions.
Laura
This chapter was a comfort to read because it addresses many of the anxieties I have regarding Common Core Standards and suggests strategies for successfully covering a wide range of content (which is demanded by the standards) through the backward design model. One thing I certainly don’t want to do as a teacher is make a “chronological march through the textbook” (28), because it would be miserable for my students and even miserable for myself (imagine going through the same book year after year!). Fortunately backward design can help to prevent this while still ensuring that I cover all the standards (as long as I do it effectively… I’m sure that I will need to practice it many times before I can master it). And, because I am a “clipboard” learner, I appreciate the structure that the backward design planning template provides. At the same time, however, I was relieved to read that “[b]ackward design does not demand a rigid sequence” (32), meaning that I do not have follow the template in order when I design my units. Too little structure is nerve-wracking to me, but so is too much structure. For these reasons, I feel that backward design will be a very useful tool for me as a future teacher.
I also found the section on integrating differentiated instruction into the backward design model to be valuable because it acted as a reminder that simply planning for content and for the standards isn’t always enough. I think it’s definitely important to provide more than one form of assessment and that they should be accounted for when designing a unit.
Shane
As a teacher this chapter reflects many different things about my future and career. The main point of this was what really matters as a teacher and what we should teach students. The main problem that this chapter discusses is that there is so much content and not enough time for it all. The research done has shown that there are so many standards and 3968 benchmarks for students to try to grasp and understand the whole concept over. The research that has been done says that if we were to spend half an hour on each of each of the benchmarks that students would end up going to school for an extra nine years. This impacts my life because I will have to be an avid planner and make sure I get try to get the most out of the information foe standards as possible. The other part of this chapter that was important was the thought of backwards planning. This is probably going to impact my life the most. I will need to figure out how to make a lesson plan and take in all of the accounts of students. The essential questions and statements is very important for kids to understand different standards and have a learning target. I have been subbing in schools and I would like to know where expeditionary learning fits into all of this? They have benchmarks and learning targets for each day, so does this help or hinder in comparison to following other standards?
Rhi
The first sentence of this chapter brings up a big concern I have, “too much content to teach given the available time” (p.24). In health its less about my concern for fitting in everything that the students need to know, but more about making sure I use the time I have to give my students all that they need to know to make smart decisions in their future about their health. It’s important to me that my students not only know what healthy choices are, but that they take the extra step and want to apply what they learn to their own lives as I believe health is the basis for all learning. If you don’t have good health, then you will have a hard time doing other things in life, like focusing in school or doing well in extra curricular activities. I’m excited to continue to take health classes for the remainder of my college career to learn about how to accomplish these sorts of things. Also I’m excited to talk to my mentor teacher about how they set up their curriculum and how they focus in on certain topics of health since there are so many. Another piece that was brought up was “understanding the ‘big ideas’” (p.26). As I noted, there are so many topics under the broad subject of health. In my classroom, I hope to be able to find out what is most important to the age group I’m teaching and be able come up with important and fun subjects to go over throughout the year.
Cooper
Some of the main things I took away from this chapter were strategies to ensure that you convey the message you want to as a teacher. The chapter talks a lot about how there is far too much content being squeezed into classes that don’t have enough time and there are certain things we can do to avoid missing important information. One of these strategies was to focus more on big concepts rather than details while it’s not suggesting that you summarily skip over pertinent details that are crucial to an understanding of the content it may suggest that sometimes using multiple examples for the same concept or getting far too precise may be wasting time and actually end up doing your students a disservice. Another concept that intrigued me was that the book we work off in class can be viewed as a supplement to rather than the guiding text to the classrooms learning. While I’ve never been interested in following a textbook page for page I would imagine teachers would have more of a responsibility to the text whether they liked it or not, this obviously isn’t to say they suggest you throw out the book but it certainly has less of an integral role than I would have thought. Finally I thought the most important concept was backwards planning which we’ve already addressed in class. Basically if we know what we want students to come away from the class understanding we can work back from there as opposed to starting from day one and hopefully building a lesson plan that ends precisely where we want it to.
Table of Contents
Abstract
CoryThis chapter talked about what really matters when it comes to teaching, and then went on to talk about backward design. In general, one should teach the overarching ideas of their subject, with the smaller facts and details supporting the overarching ideas. If a teacher wants their students to learn these ideas, an effective method of planning is by fallowing the three step backward design model. The first step is figuring out the desired results. What do you want your students to be able to do/understand by the end of your unit? The second step is to determine what is acceptable evidence of this understanding. How and how often will you assess your students understanding of the material? The third and final step is to plan your actual lessons. What kind of lessons will you create to get you major ideas across?
Synthesis
CoryFor the most part, everyone talked about two thing s that connect well together: backward planning and that teachers should focus on the overarching ideas of their content. For the most part most of my classmates were saying that it is very important to point out the large ideas and what you expect of your students throughout the course. Many people really liked the backward design model because it gave you a concrete strategy to work with when it comes to making a curriculum.
Cory
This chapter started to tie together backwards design and differentiated learning. In the chapter, it explained the three steps to backward design, and then went on to explain where differentiated learning can be used at each step. But over all, this chapter focused on how teaches should focus more on the big idea when designing a unit, having the smaller details filled in along the way. I couldn’t agree more with this. I am personally someone who likes to read something and then think of it as a big picture rather than a large group of small details. It’s hard to see through the forest when you get caught up in the leaves. In this case we need to focus on the larger ideas for our students to fully understand the smaller one. I found it interesting that if we were to take 30 minutes of instructional time for all of the benchmarks stated by Robert Marzano and John Kendall, then it would take an additional nine years of schooling for a student to learn all of them. This is because some standards are way too narrow, and in my opinion, they should be broadened. Many American and Canadian textbooks also have too many standards, trying to make the most bang for their buck. But this is why teachers who try to teach to the textbook fail. I personally never liked the teachers that felt they were restricted to the textbook. In those classes, I felt that I didn’t need the teacher at all, all I needed was the textbook because it had all of the information.Sarah
In this chapter I learned about the backward design process. It says to first consider the big picture by considering goals, examining content standards, and reviewing curriculum expectations. The next thing to do is to narrow it down by considering in advance the assessment evidence that is needed to document the targeted learning has been achieved. The final step in the process is to completely narrow down what you are doing. In the last step, as the teacher you figure out what instructional activities are the most appropriate. The big thing that this design plan provides is the structure to support flexibility in teaching and assessments while honoring the integrity of the content but also respecting the individuality of the students learning processes. This impacts me in a big way. Since I will have to write lesson plans and the plan for a unit, I have a way of doing so that will first make sure that I have reached the content standards and curriculum expectations. Using this process I can look at the big picture first and then begin breaking the unit into parts. This process will make it easier to see where I am headed before I plan a lesson or unit instead of planning a lesson and not knowing where I am going with it or if it meets the curriculum or content standards. This method of making lesson plans will majorly impact my classroom because I can teach the curriculum and satisfy the standards while satisfying each student’s individual learning process and style.Lydia
As a teacher I have to be aware of what the requirements for the classes I teach are. I also have to determine if some of the standards that I have will not be relevant because they are too large or too small to teach in the amount of time that I will have in a certain class. I also have to determine what will be an acceptable way to test a student’s knowledge. I have learned that I can plan all of this out on something called the backward design. This will affect my classroom because it will give structure to the class while also giving students in my class the chance to explore their own learning abilities. This will affect me because it will give me a guideline to what I should be teaching as well as give me an idea of things that I should change for the next year if my plan did not work.It is also important that I determine ahead of time in what way I should gauge the knowledge that the students have learned from my lessons. In Social Studies I could either decide to give a multiple choice assessment, a written assessment, or ask the students to give a presentation. This will affect me because I must make the decision on how to correctly assess my students and make sure that they carry the knowledge with them to their years ahead of them. This will affect my students because some of them may be good at taking test while others will excel in creative assessments such as projects.
Dominick
This chapter brought forth a sad, but true reality for all teachers. There is too much material and too little time for all of it to be taught. The important for future educators to realize after reading this chapter is to get across the main points in there material. Making the student see the bigger picture is a key part to teaching your content correctly. Rushing through information in an attempt to cover all of the material in the course will cause the classroom to change from a place of tranquility for students to a nightmare. Teachers will sometimes get too caught up in trying to cover everything in the book and miss out on what they are actually supposed to be doing. The teacher’s main goal should be to present the big picture to students, so they can carry that information with them once they leave the classroom. Obviously, giving the student smaller details to work with is good in understanding the over arching theme, but it should not be a priority to hit on every single small detail. Students should not be pressured to learn a ton of material in a short amount of time, well at least in high school they should not. Teachers need to take it step by step starting with what they want to accomplish. What does the teacher want their students to take away from the course? Teachers then need to figure out they will know whether or not they have succeed. How will they know if students have gotten a grasp on the material? Test? Quizzes? Projects? Essays? Finally, they will need to figure what materials they will need available to them. What is the teacher going to need to be provided in order to meet their goals?Cheyenne
I think backward planning is a really important tool for teachers, especially when it comes to trying to figure out the whole overarching point of a unit. Starting in the opposite direction, creating lessons first and then bringing them all together in the end, seems like it has much more potential for error. A teacher could be planning lessons, thinking that they will all work together, and then realize they are missing a key point, or don’t really mesh well together. With backwards planning, it kind of helps to eliminate the possibility that you’ll end up with a bunch of lessons that in theory go well together, but in practice are kind of a mess.I am also a fan of how the text discourages readers, and thus teachers, from solely teaching from the books. Yeah, textbooks can be a good base for Units and lessons, but I’ve often had teachers where their entire class was just us reading the book and then him repeating the same information the next day. He also expected that through all of this fact learning and memorization, we would figure out a way to think more in-depth about the contents. We never did, and because of his poor teaching style, many of us didn’t do well in the class. Sure, if you have a textbook available, it can be helpful to look at the book as a guide towards where you want your class to go, but you should move further than that when actually teaching the material.
Katelin
In the profession of teaching, we all know that there is always way too much content in a year to get through if you want your students to actually learn the material. I was amazed when it said that it was an additional nine of years of school to get through everything, which is more than half of their education experience. So basically, what every school has to decide is what is really the “big ideas” that we need to have our students learn? This is a huge topic that I will have to learn and others will also. Creating and focusing on the essential questions is a part that will tie into it also. Also, that the “what” to teaching is where this is important. Not worrying about how you’re going to adapt the concept to every student, but more of what is that concept that you want every student to learn.The design is more clear in my head on the fact that figuring out the end goal that you want students to learn is essential to teaching because if you have an idea that is “foggy” on how it will turn out, it may be a waste of time and not be executed correctly. I need to know what I want them to learn in order for them to learn it. Another important part I took away from this is that I can not vary the criteria for an assignment, or it becomes unfair and each student isn’t completing the same assignment.Sara
In chapter three of Integrating Differentiated Instruction & Understanding by Design, we are introduced to the concept of standards. These standards are set forth by the government to ensure that students are learning the material that they need to at the correct time. They are meant to ensure a student’s education experience is at the level it needs to be while also regulating schools in the same state. While standards are meant to be a good thing there are parts of them that can be tricky for a teacher, such as the number of standards that they are required to teach in a given year. There can sometimes be too many standards that teachers are expected to teach, there is just simply not enough time in the school year for all of them. Even with the expectation that a teacher may not be able to hit all standards in a school year, there is still the daunting task of how to get through as many standards as possible while still making sure students are actually learning the material. By focusing on a big picture, and smaller essential questions teachers can more accurately help students understand the material.In a math classroom the application of this idea is very important. In any given year in a student’s math education there are going to be multiple rules and formulas that students will need to understand. To try to hit all the standards teacher can simply rush over concepts, give students a formula and tell them to memorize, test them and move on. However by doings this students will not absorb the information. It will require careful consideration and planning to ensure that students will retain pertain information, as well as the use of big ideas and essential questions.
Laura
This chapter was a comfort to read because it addresses many of the anxieties I have regarding Common Core Standards and suggests strategies for successfully covering a wide range of content (which is demanded by the standards) through the backward design model. One thing I certainly don’t want to do as a teacher is make a “chronological march through the textbook” (28), because it would be miserable for my students and even miserable for myself (imagine going through the same book year after year!). Fortunately backward design can help to prevent this while still ensuring that I cover all the standards (as long as I do it effectively… I’m sure that I will need to practice it many times before I can master it). And, because I am a “clipboard” learner, I appreciate the structure that the backward design planning template provides. At the same time, however, I was relieved to read that “[b]ackward design does not demand a rigid sequence” (32), meaning that I do not have follow the template in order when I design my units. Too little structure is nerve-wracking to me, but so is too much structure. For these reasons, I feel that backward design will be a very useful tool for me as a future teacher.I also found the section on integrating differentiated instruction into the backward design model to be valuable because it acted as a reminder that simply planning for content and for the standards isn’t always enough. I think it’s definitely important to provide more than one form of assessment and that they should be accounted for when designing a unit.
Shane
As a teacher this chapter reflects many different things about my future and career. The main point of this was what really matters as a teacher and what we should teach students. The main problem that this chapter discusses is that there is so much content and not enough time for it all. The research done has shown that there are so many standards and 3968 benchmarks for students to try to grasp and understand the whole concept over. The research that has been done says that if we were to spend half an hour on each of each of the benchmarks that students would end up going to school for an extra nine years. This impacts my life because I will have to be an avid planner and make sure I get try to get the most out of the information foe standards as possible. The other part of this chapter that was important was the thought of backwards planning. This is probably going to impact my life the most. I will need to figure out how to make a lesson plan and take in all of the accounts of students. The essential questions and statements is very important for kids to understand different standards and have a learning target. I have been subbing in schools and I would like to know where expeditionary learning fits into all of this? They have benchmarks and learning targets for each day, so does this help or hinder in comparison to following other standards?Rhi
The first sentence of this chapter brings up a big concern I have, “too much content to teach given the available time” (p.24). In health its less about my concern for fitting in everything that the students need to know, but more about making sure I use the time I have to give my students all that they need to know to make smart decisions in their future about their health. It’s important to me that my students not only know what healthy choices are, but that they take the extra step and want to apply what they learn to their own lives as I believe health is the basis for all learning. If you don’t have good health, then you will have a hard time doing other things in life, like focusing in school or doing well in extra curricular activities. I’m excited to continue to take health classes for the remainder of my college career to learn about how to accomplish these sorts of things. Also I’m excited to talk to my mentor teacher about how they set up their curriculum and how they focus in on certain topics of health since there are so many. Another piece that was brought up was “understanding the ‘big ideas’” (p.26). As I noted, there are so many topics under the broad subject of health. In my classroom, I hope to be able to find out what is most important to the age group I’m teaching and be able come up with important and fun subjects to go over throughout the year.Cooper
Some of the main things I took away from this chapter were strategies to ensure that you convey the message you want to as a teacher. The chapter talks a lot about how there is far too much content being squeezed into classes that don’t have enough time and there are certain things we can do to avoid missing important information. One of these strategies was to focus more on big concepts rather than details while it’s not suggesting that you summarily skip over pertinent details that are crucial to an understanding of the content it may suggest that sometimes using multiple examples for the same concept or getting far too precise may be wasting time and actually end up doing your students a disservice. Another concept that intrigued me was that the book we work off in class can be viewed as a supplement to rather than the guiding text to the classrooms learning. While I’ve never been interested in following a textbook page for page I would imagine teachers would have more of a responsibility to the text whether they liked it or not, this obviously isn’t to say they suggest you throw out the book but it certainly has less of an integral role than I would have thought. Finally I thought the most important concept was backwards planning which we’ve already addressed in class. Basically if we know what we want students to come away from the class understanding we can work back from there as opposed to starting from day one and hopefully building a lesson plan that ends precisely where we want it to.